In the Shadow of the Cypress

IN THE
SHADOW

OF THE
CYPRESS

IN THE
SHADOW
OF THE
CYPRESS

THOMAS STEINBECK

GALLERY BOOKS
NEW YORK LONDON TORONTO SYDNEY

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2010 by Thomas Steinbeck

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Gallery Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Gallery Books hardcover edition April 2010

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Designed by Joy O’Meara

Manufactured in the United States of America

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Steinbeck, Thomas.

In the shadow of the cypress / Thomas Steinbeck.—1st Gallery Books

hardcover ed.

p. cm.

1. Chinese—California—Fiction. 2. Immigrants—California—Fiction.

3. California—History—1850–1950—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3619.T47615I52 2010

813'.6—dc22

2009033355

ISBN 978-1-4391-6825-7

ISBN 978-1-4391-6988-9 (ebook)

This modest volume is dedicated to

Rubilee Knight,

Heaven’s testimony that angels live among us

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Bringing any book into print is as much a team effort as staging a play, or producing a film, and in that regard there are a number of very able people who are owed not only credit for this book, but also my full store of gratitude and appreciation.

First I wish to thank my very talented wife, Gail Knight Steinbeck, for her tireless efforts as my agent. Her mastery of complex contract negotiations has saved my bacon on numerous occasions, and her support and skills as a first-draft editor have proved invaluable over the years. In that same vein I wish to thank Dan Smetanka, a truly professional and thoughtful editor, for helping me with this book long before it found a home with Simon & Schuster. In fact, I’m convinced that it was due to his insight and expertise that it found a home at all.

I would also like to express my deep appreciation to Anthony Ziccardi at Simon & Schuster for giving me the opportunity to come in out of the rain for a while. My gratitude stimulates a natural desire to always be worthy of his confidence and generosity. I would also like to express my gratitude to my new editor at Simon & Schuster, Kathy Sagan. Her compassion and patience in the wake of many difficulties have been truly inspirational. I look forward to luxuriating in the warmth of her support, her consummate literary sensitivity, and her vast experience for the many tales as yet unborn.

Family support and encouragement has always been the abiding grace for those artists who are fortunate enough to lay claim to it in any form. And to those of my family who have helped to keep the ship on an even keel all these years, I must
first thank the indomitable queen of our clan, Rubilee Knight, a paladin of the “greatest generation,” and in its older and more romantic connotation, a true flower of southern womanhood. “She is a creature of many intricate parts, and all the parts are true and well fashioned.”

In that same vein, I wish to express my sincere gratitude to Mike and Patti Hilton for all their loving support. This also stands true for my dear friends Myrica Taylor and Mary Jean Vignone. Their sympathetic concerns and timely assistance in turbulent seas is much appreciated.

For love, inspiration, courage, and music I’m blessed to have Johnny Irion and Sarah Lee Guthrie as a part of my family. But I especially owe their two beautiful and talented daughters, Olivia and Sophie, a mark of personal gratitude for remaining constant reminders that I have readers yet to come, and that’s a weighty responsibility for someone of my tender years. I would also like to thank my friend Gerry Low-Sabado for her valuable insights concerning the coastal Chinese communities of Monterey, and my old mate Kent Seavey for his concise historical perspectives and timely assistance in all things arcane and mysterious.

And I wish to express my sincere thanks to Harry Lewis, who has every right to lay claim to being a true patron of this work. His patience and kindness has engendered great affection and loyalty. I also wish to acknowledge my dear friends, the O’Connell family. They have generously looked after the balance of my sanity for the better part of five years, with marginally interesting results. I am looking forward to a complete recovery one of these days when I have nothing better to do.

And last, I would like to personally communicate my sincere gratitude to the nation and people of China for having gifted me a lifelong focus of study that has never once disappointed my historical interest or dampened my enthusiasm to know more.

PROLOGUE

W
HEN
I
WAS A CHILD
in Monterey my two best friends were gifted Chinese boys named Billy Chen Su and B. D. Chu Mui (better known as “Bee-Dee” Mui to his friends). It was from their respectful relationship with their own parents that I ultimately learned the obligations and abiding value of familial respect, and the cultural pride that comes from being able to name one’s ancestors back through the ages. Despite their pressed financial circumstances, my childhood friends lived with the confidence that they were inheritors of an ancient culture grounded in well-documented history, literature, medicine, and art, while I was the product of a race that, until the eleventh century, most likely painted themselves blue, lived in vermin-infested hovels, slaughtered their neighbors for sport, and stole cattle by profession. My envy of my Chinese friends was truly palpable. Thus, it is to those intrepid Chinese fishermen and farmers of Monterey that I owe the inspiration for this historical flight of possibilities. The past may indeed be prologue, but it is the future that invariably answers the questions of history.

JOURNAL EXTRACTS OF
DR. CHARLES H. GILBERT

Stanford Professor of Marine Biology

“True wisdom comes at great cost.
Only ignorance is free.”

—
TAOIST PROVERB

I
N 1906, AT THE TIME
these entries were written, Dr. Gilbert was a highly respected instructor and researcher at Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove, California.

Dr. Charles Lucas

Stanford University

Department of Marine Studies

2008

Partial diary entry: June 1, 1906

The raging China Point fire was an experience that must be forever etched in the memories of everyone who witnessed the tragedy, though I presently suspect there were those who perceived only profit in the flames. On the night of May 16, 1906, aided by predictably seasonal winds from the southwest, the fifty-year-old Chinese fishing village on China Point was completely burned to the ground in less than one hour. It was the most horrifying conflagration I have ever witnessed. My heart was wrenched with concern for the poor occupants of the village, and I feared the worst for the plight of those trapped in their shanties. The dwellings seemed to burst into flame like boxes of kitchen matches, but there was nothing anyone could do without suffering death for their efforts. By
dawn the whole village was nothing more than a black, smoldering skeleton. It was only through the grace of a merciful God that no Chinese were killed in the racing inferno. But it is a certainty to all witnesses that they had lost most of what they once possessed, including some of their nets, sheds, and beached fishing boats.

The fire’s ignition point was most certainly a Chinese-owned hay barn at the south end of the village, and I’m persuaded the deed was initiated with the strong seasonal winds in mind. Though it disturbs me to say so, I am thoroughly convinced that the consequential inferno was the result of a determined and planned act of arson.

If armed with the perspective of hindsight, one can easily deduce that the following narrative has roots that stretch back more than sixty years, and perhaps more than several hundred years if the truth was known. The one person who might be said to have set the engine of destruction in motion is a strange fellow who I came to know in early June of 1898. The man’s name, appropriately enough, was William “Red Billy” O’Flynn.